Five Low Level Magic Items for Creative Players in Dungeons & Dragons 5e

in the worlds of Dungeons and Dragons many magic items are obvious in their power the rune inscribed magic weapons the wand of fireballs bristling with burning energy or the unbreakable adamantium full plate armor some items however are more subtle in their power and demand a creative mind to unlock their true potential today we're taking a look at five low-level magic items to spark creative play in Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition my name is Monte Martin and I'm Kelley McLaughlin and we are the dungeon dudes welcome to our channel where we discuss everything Dungeons & Dragons including advice for Dungeon Master's and guides for players we upload new videos every Thursday so please subscribe to our channel so that you never miss an episode today we are taking an in-depth look at five low level magic items found in the dungeon masters guide for Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition all of these magic items are of uncommon rarity and could be awarded to player characters as early as 1st level meaning that they can be present in almost any Dungeons and Dragons game these magic items aren't going to increase their combat power too much but instead are going to give them creative options to use in play that can really get them excited there's lots to discuss so let's get rolling the first magic item we're looking at is an essential magic item for almost any D&D adventuring group and it's found on page 153 of the Dungeon Master's guide and that is the bag of holding the bag of holding is a staple in Dungeons & Dragons and while the bag of holding is often deployed as a inventory management tool so that you can hand wave away worrying about carry weight and encumbrance the bag of holding is actually a magic item that has many creative and interesting implications when we start looking at what it can actually be used for the bag of holding much like doctor who's TARDIS is much bigger on the inside it can hold upwards of 500 pounds and can't exceed 64 cubic feet that's about an area of 4 feet by 4 feet by 4 feet in fact the rules say the mouth of the bag is two feet wide and it is about four feet deep in itself so you can imagine that there's almost an entire five-foot cube inside the bag of holding itself the bag though regardless of what's put in it only ever weighs 15 pounds if the bag is overloaded ruptured or torn its contents spill out into the astral plane and may be lost forever and you can turn the bag of holding inside out but if you do this the contents spill out and the bag has to be put back before it can be used as a bag of holding again creatures can go inside the bag of holding and they can hold their breath and breathe air for a number of minutes equal to ten divided by the number of creatures in the bag so if you stuff your halfling friend in the bag of holding they can survive in there for ten minutes one thing to be aware of with the bag of holding is that if you place it inside another extra dimensional space such as the HandiHaler sack or the portable hole you're going to create a little bit of an issue for yourself this is because doing so opens up a rift into the astral plane that instantly sucks any creature within 10 feet destroying the bag and the portable hole depositing the creatures and the objects into the astral plane and then closing the gate behind them could be very useful in certain situations but very dangerous and others will this work if you put a bag of holding inside of another bag of holding I mean a bag of holding is itself an extra dimensional space so my ruling would be yes that don't put two bags of holding inside each other cuz this is what's gonna happen it's a completely random location in the astral plane as well so you might not have any way of getting home you could make an entire adventure around an adventuring party that accidentally puts a bag of holding inside of another bag of holding and then they're lost in the astral plane and need to find their way home sounds like a true Odyssey now you could also use this as a way of destroying your enemies by banishing to them the astral plane just hope that they never find their way back but of course a lot of questions emerge with a bag of holding of once you can put other creatures and objects inside it yeah and with them being able to hold their breath up to ten minutes inside the bag of holding this is actually a very useful tool for infiltration if you have a sneaky character and a non sneaky character shoved the non sneaky character into the bag of holding get to where you need to go and then let them out but you do have that ten minute timer before they suffocate would this work if you stuffed a bunch of your friends in a bag of holding and then dimension door with them would that allow you to carry more creatures with you then dimension door normally allow if a player came up with that at the table I would allow it because that's a creative solution I think that's really creative but I would be worried that a lot of groups would start abusing that especially now that we're seeing it on our show you're stuck underwater the bag of holding is a wait is it yeah it's it's a 10-minute long air bubble I have seen players that have tried to stuff furniture and giant statues and all sorts of massive objects into a bag of holding because they don't pay attention to the fact that it only holds up to 500 pounds and it only carries 64 cubic feet and I think a lot of people don't think of what 64 cubic feet is but it is basically smaller than one square on the battle map I love the idea though of sneaking up behind someone with the bag of holding and abducting them with it yeah if you've got to capture an enemy could you just drop the bag of holding on them and scoop them up and run away absolutely how would you get out of a bag of holding if you were trapped inside it I would say that when the bags closed you could still see like the flap up above you if you were inside and I think that a strength check that wasn't too difficult would allow you to pop out yeah I think that's the most important thing to note is that because the bag of holding is four feet deep if you unless you're trying to do this to a gnome or a halfling most people are taller than that so you drop the bag over their head and I would absolutely first give them a saving throw to just avoid it entirely and then I think I would have a series of strength or athletics or acrobatics checks to actually wrestle the creature into it I would never make it as easy as just making one stealth check to successfully drop the bag over someone's head I would always give several saving throws and opposed ability checks to escape this because it is potentially deadly it's very important to note then it takes an action to retrieve or an item inside a bag of holding so this can be really important if you are going to try to use it as a trap of some kind because then you can think of how that action is actually going to work continuing our theme of extra dimensional spaces and pulling things out of different dimensions the robe of useful items is the next magic item we're taking a look at and you can find that on page 195 of the Dungeon Master's guide the robe of useful objects has many different colorful patches and pockets all around it with different symbols on them as an action you can take one of the patches and remove it turning that patch into the item it represents once you remove the last patch on the robe of useful items it becomes a non magical garment probably not a very stylish one at that once all the patches have been ripped off a bit but it has a lot of patches to begin with the robe has many useful items you can have a dagger a bull's-eye Lantern a mirror a hempen rope a ten-foot pole or a sack every robe of useful items has two patches for each of those items but then it has 4d for randomly-generated or DM decided patches of varying different qualities and they include a bag of a hundred gold pieces silver coffer one foot long six inches wide and deep worth 500 gold an IRA nor up to ten feet wide and high bard on the side of your choice which you can place in an opening you can reach and then it instantly attaches and hinges itself ten gems worth 100 gold each a 24 foot long wooden ladder a riding horse with saddlebags a pit that you can instantly place on the ground which is a cube 10 feet wide long and deep for potions of healing a 12 foot long rowboat spell scroll containing one spell of first a third level to Mastiffs a window two feet by four feet and up to two feet deep which you can place on a vertical surface you can reach a portable battering ram it's great there are so many weird and quirky items on this list but also all them are useful and you never know when you're going to need them this is like a hoarders favorite magic item because it's like I can't I can't use my patches I might need them players will find the weirdest ways to use these items in one of our campaigns I'm pretty sure we had somebody use the ladder to throw under an enemy in combat and it just shot up 24 feet yeah because these items appear as an action so if you're in the middle of battle you can rip one off and all of a sudden release the hounds or there's a horse that you can ride away on you might all of a sudden pull off the patch and there's healing potions so everyone in your party can get healed up or if you need to bribe somebody you can just pull the gems right out it's so fun playing around with this item and I just think that it sparks so much creativity and imagination from a player on how they're gonna use these items and when they're gonna use these items yeah because a lot of the items on this list are items that players don't always stock up on not a lot of players are going to carry around a 24 foot long ladder or a rowboat with them players might not even have mounts but then there will be that one time in the adventure where the robe of useful items has the magic item that solves their problem and I don't mean magic items enchanted but the perfect item for the job and that's kind of the lovely thing about it and the players will feel awesome when that happens the next item we're looking at is something that seems so simple but it's so useful and that's the a moveable rod found on page 174 of the Dungeon Master's guide this flat iron rod has one button on the end of it you can hold the rod in space press the button and it stays there in defiance of gravity holding upwards of 8,000 pounds of weight and requiring a DC 30 strength check to even attempt to move it it otherwise stays completely in place and it's just gonna be a complete inanimate carbon rod just hanging out there in space at 8,000 pounds in Rod We Trust that's all it does it just stays there until you press the button again or try to move it what's beautiful about the simplicity of this is that it leaves everything up to the players imagination on how to use this rod the rules for it are extremely simple but man have I seen it do some really crazy things in a campaign one of the most obvious uses of it has actually been to assemble several movable rods and use them together as a ladder to climb up to any height you need you just place the movable rod place it climb up place another one climb up place another one climb up you could also use it to bar a door from the other side or to hold up a portcullis or a gate or support something that might be collapsing to really drive home the creativity of the immovable rod I need to tell a personal story from one of our home campaigns we were on a sled going down a mountain trying to outrun an avalanche at high speeds a large troll jumped onto the sled with us and we were fighting it our peloton had the immovable rod and just jumped up and locked it into space in front of the troll locking it in space moving at high speeds meant that it then clothesline the troll who then was swept back and the Avalanche overtook him as we escaped it was one of the best uses that I had ever seen in a game for the a movable rod I believe in that same campaign we also used it in the final blows against a dragon to wedge it in the dragon's mouth and stick it there so that we could just get a few last attacks on him the same player wanted to use the movable rod to prevent the dragon from using its breadth weapon again and I thought that's a perfect interpretation of it and then it turned out in the next round the dragon was hit by flesh to stone and so it's statue now hovers there over the city floating in space supported by the movable rod these are just a couple examples and as a DM listen to your players creativity and decide what you're going to allow and what you're not going to allow but if it seems like a reasonable use of being able to place a rod stuck there in space make it happen because it can be so fun for the players to think outside the box and come up with something really cool for this item I'll say that part of the reason why I as a dungeon master allowed both of those situations to work so well was because it involved the a movable rod being destroyed in some way or lost to the party in both cases the party had difficulty getting the rod back and thought it was the last thing they were ever gonna do with it and when those kind of sacrifices get made with creative items like that I really like this because it prevents that from later being something that the party abuses yeah when when you lose the a movable rod it's not something that you're gonna replicate every single combat encounter it's a one-time thing that creates an epic and memorable moment those might be two of the most memorable moments from that entire campaign experienced Dungeons & Dragons players know tales of an infamous deck of cards lurking in the pages of the Dungeon Master's guide and we're not talking about that one today cuz today we're to referring to the deck of illusions the other deck of cards which is sure to cause your entire party to freak out thinking that it is the deck of many things but it's not it's instead a really fun and creative magic item found on page 161 of the Dungeon Master's guide the deck contains 34 cards if you find it as a treasure there's a chance that it's missing one d20 minus one cards from it the magic of this deck only works if as an action you draw card at random and throw it within 30 feet of you creating an illusion of the picture represented on that card once you throw down the card and conjure up the illusory creature that illusion lasts until it's dispelled or you move the card well you're within a hundred and twenty feet of the card itself you can use an action to cause the illusion to move or change in some way as long as that illusion stays within 30 feet of where the card is on the ground once the illusion disappears the card is non magical and is used up and creatures can examine the cards with a DC 15 intelligence or investigation check to determine that they are a loser E in nature or because their hands and limbs pass through the illusions the illusionary create appear real and of the appropriate size and act accordingly with what they represent however they can do no harm and there are many different creatures that can be conjured up by this deck of illusions unfortunately because they are randomly generated you're gonna have to be a little bit creative because you never know what you're gonna get from it but there's all sorts of ways that you can spin this into some interesting situations there are many different creatures that you can draw from this deck such as dragons or ogres or giants there are mundane creatures like battalions of soldiers Archmage's assassins ohrp's goblins cobalt and even a beholder is in this deck and because they look and act real and they're conjured up magically by throwing a card you can engineer these in so many different ways I could see using them as intimidation tactics in so many situations some enemy says to you you and what army and you throw down one of these cards and I hope that it's good enough to scare them the interesting thing about the deck is that as you use the cards because they're determined randomly you can still go through and see what cards you have left so you can use a little bit of that game theory that as your deck gets pared down you actually know with increasing certainty what's gonna come out of there so maybe once you get this deck down to the end you know that what's gonna come out of there is either gonna be a lich a beholder or a dragon which is a pretty intimidating creature and I really wonder like is the lich gonna act domineering is it gonna act like an arcane lich that is trying to take over the world is the dragon gonna threaten to eat people is the beholder gonna like shoot ilusory I raise that scare people because that could be an awesome way of fooling a large group of people because the illusion makes sounds you could use this as a lookout if you have a creature standing guard and somebody's approaching it may start to make a whole bunch of noise to alert you that there's somebody coming yeah the creature doesn't obey you but you could talk to it so if you've got a humanoid common speaking illusion you could converse with it perhaps you could I mean that's up to diem interpretation but assuming you could maybe you could just use your deck of illusions as friends if you have no friends now you have 34 new friends or just throw all the cards down when you're about to march to war and have the enemy army look up oh yeah there's an assortment of 34 creatures and then you and your four comrades standing at the front lines that would be great like if you've got to defend a position you just put all the cards down and have them all Manning the walls and now it looks like you've got this fortress that is protected by all these great allies yeah it's your home security system yeah you're leaving the castle for a week so you put a big dragon up on the top and you're just like okay now there's a dragon watching over the castle and anybody that approaches is gonna see it roaring up at the top I could totally see this as being a seed for a campaign where maybe there's a rogue or a conman that scares villages using a deck of illusions and they're not real but like he pretends to slay the creature or says Oh dragons haunt in this area and puts the card on the top of like a ruined tower and is conning all the townspeople to think this dragon is there but it's just an illusion and the players keep researching these monster encounters and finding these cards yeah every time and being like what is this and lastly possibly the most problematic item on this list is the decanter of endless water found on page 161 of the Dungeon Master's guide the decanter of endless water appears as a Stoppard water skin that weighs about two pounds on your turn you can use an action to remove the stopper and speak a command word one of three different command words and when you do so a certain amount of water either fresh water or salt water pours out of the flask you can say stream and a gallon of water appears you can say fountain and 10 gallons of water appear or you can speak the word geyser and 30 gallons of water pour forth from the decanter wedding geyser mode you can use a bonus action to aim the geyser at a creature within 30 feet of you and they have to make a strength saving throw or they take one beef or points of bludgeoning damage and are knocked prone after you say one of the command words on your next turn the water stops pouring out so you have to say it again if you want to but there's no charges or no limits you can keep using the decanter of endless water to conjure up an endless amount of water and that is precisely why the decanter of endless water can be so problematic the one that pops into my head immediately is if you are at the entrance of a cave and there's a lot of enemies that you know are in there you could just stand at the mouth of the cave and keep saying geyser every turn until the entire cave is flushed out 30 gallons of water at a time rushing through okay so let's actually talk about that and do some math so 30 gallons of water occupies a volume of approximately 4 cubic feet this means that to fill up a 5 by 5 by 5 cube of space in Dungeons & Dragons it takes through about 3 minutes to fill up one five-foot cube okay so maybe not an entire cave but what if you have some people trapped in a house and you're standing on the roof pouring geysers down I mean you could use it to put out fires and conceivably maybe you could use it to flood the dungeon it's just gonna take a really long time to do that but if you've got time and you don't have to go stomping in there what's stopping you from just sitting there and then any enemy that tries to come out is getting blasted with gallons of water well obsessively at a certain point at like those the lower levels of the dungeon start to flood aren't the occupants of the dungeon gonna be like hey what's going on and they're gonna follow the stream of water and come and trudge through it and then get blasted back knocked prone and swept out down ok my question though is at what point would the occupants of the dungeon actually notice that because I don't know about you but if I see a leak in my basement I flip out and try to find out what's going on so I think that even a trickle of water pouring in before it gets to the point where they're trudging knee-deep in water I think the dungeon occupants are gonna be trying to figure out like where's this will be coming from ok fair enough so you've poked a hole in that one but what are some other creative uses there's there's still a lot of problematic ideas here just the fact that it produces so much water in such a short amount of time means that you could solve problems like droughts and thirst really the deadliest thing about the decanter of endless water is chopping an enemy somewhere and filling that space with water yeah how long does the decanter of endless water take to fill up a bag of holding oh that's an interesting question so the bag of holding is 64 square feet so the decanter events water on geyser mode can fill it up in about two minutes but I wonder if that much water weighs more than 500 pounds a geyser of water puts out 30 gallons and a gallon of water weighs about eight and a half pounds so two geysers fired into the bagofholding which only occupy 8 cubic feet will almost fill up the maximum weight capacity of a bag of holding and cause it to rupture here's another scenario for you you're on an icy slope with the enemies coming towards you and you just start sending geysers down making it even slippier using the water from the decanter of endless water to create ice in a frozen environment not only that but the ice on top of more water coming is gonna make it really difficult for enemies to get to you ok would you allow a player to pour out a bunch of water with a decanter of endless water and then use ray of frost to freeze it I would to set up a trap that is a great creative use of this yeah that would be really cool or even just make ice cubes in general this item can be used to save your players lives if they're struggling with getting enough water trudging through a desert or something like that when it comes to the creative uses there's a lot of really interesting ways they could think of using this to affect enemies and it's up to you as the DM to decide what you're going to allow and what isn't going to work with this item I think the key thing to remember is that while the decanter of endless water does give the player characters access to a potentially endless reserve of water it takes time for it to do things like flood rooms dungeons chambers and it can't even fill up a bag of holding properly one of the most annoying things about the decanter of an endless water is having to do all the math to calculate exactly how much surface area it can fill up so this has been a look at five low level magic items for creative play in Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition if you've used any of these items or have other favorites tell us about them in the comments below and of course if you're enjoying the show please consider supporting our work on patreon you can find out how by following the links in the description below don't forget to check out our live play dungeons of dragon hime which airs Tuesday nights at 6 p.m. Eastern on Twitch you find all the previous episodes right up over here and we've got more on magic and magic items in Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition and up over here please subscribe to our channel so that you never miss an episode thank you so much for watching and we'll see you next time in the dungeon

Channel: Dungeon Dudes

Views: 1,031,125

Keywords: dungeons, dragons, tabletop, gaming, roleplaying, games, accessories, rules, rule, gameplay, play, game, rpg, d20, player, character, D&D, 5e, DM, PC, tips, advice, guide, guides, review, dice, books, book

Id: EybcxFNIMKk

Length: 25min 28sec (1528 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 03 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/YOUREABOT]

who needs trap finding when you can spring all of the traps from a safe distance with a decanter of endless water. combine it with mage hand, and traps are a thing of the past.